Senate Passes Bills

I am proud that the Wisconsin State Senate passed three of my bills earlier this week.

Those three bills are:

• AB 727: Takes a multi-pronged approach to protecting Wisconsin’s water from excessive nitrates and other contaminants.

This is accomplished by creating a Commercial Nitrogen Optimization Pilot Program where farmers can receive grants for implementing new and innovative practices that optimize the application of commercial nitrogen, by providing cover crop insurance premium rebates to help offset the costs of planting cover crops and by establishing a three-year hydrogeologist position within the UW System to develop localized groundwater resource data.

Once again, this legislation follows my philosophy of bringing together the agricultural and conservation communities to find solutions that effect real change. You can read a joint press release from multiple farm groups by clicking here.

• AB 914: Allows the Town of Gibraltar to create a tax incremental district that will pave the way for more than 100 new workforce housing units, which are desperately needed in the area.
  
  AB 446: Strengthens state reading screening standards, provides parents with more transparency and ensures that teachers have the necessary framework and tools to help every student learn to read proficiently.

Because these bills have already been passed by the Assembly, they now head to the governor’s desk to be signed into law.

Additionally, I have two other bills that are eligible to become state law. They are:

• AB 693: Provides up to $5.6 million in authorized but unobligated Knowles-Nelson Stewardship funds to complete critical health- and safety-related water infrastructure projects at Wisconsin’s high-demand state parks. This includes Potawatomi State Park and Newport State Park in Door County.
  
  
• AB 570: Protects basic property rights by building better relationships between condominium associations and unit owners.

$22 Billion in Tax Savings

The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau has released a memo detailing the cumulative tax savings for our state since 2011, and the results are rather impressive.

According to the LFB, the state Legislature’s goal of cutting taxes has saved Wisconsin taxpayers about $22 billion over the past 11 years.

Prior to Scott Walker being elected governor in November of 2010, Wisconsin had the fifth-highest tax rate in the country. The state was also in a $3.6 billion structural deficit and had very little in its “rainy day” fund.

Now, we are expected to have a budget surplus of $3.8 billion at the end of the 2021-23 biennium. Our state’s rainy day account also had a record balance of $1.7 billion at the close of the 2021 fiscal year.

I have always vowed to be a responsible steward of your tax dollars and I will continue to work hard to ensure that we see additional tax savings in the future.

Room Tax Revenue

The Peninsula Pulse recently reported that 2021 lodging revenues in Door County were $38.7 million higher than in 2019, the last full year before COVID-19 restrictions were implemented.

As a result, room tax collections increased by more than 40 percent, from $5.1 million to approximately $7.3 million.

Thanks to my legislation that was signed into law earlier this session, we can all be confident that those tax dollars are staying local. 

Back in 2019, the Legislature passed a bill that required short-term rental companies – like Airbnb and Vrbo – to collect and remit the room tax on behalf of their rental clients. However, it became common practice for those businesses to remit room tax revenues based on zip codes.

That presented several problems because some zip codes — especially in rural areas – consist of several municipalities, thereby making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to determine the accuracy of the individual revenue totals.

That is a thing of the past since short-term rental companies now have to fill out forms to ensure that room tax revenues are going to the correct communities. Furthermore, a local government may call for an audit if they have probable cause to believe the tax revenues they receive are inaccurate.